The Stout Republican

I’ve been reading up on statistical analysis lately, as the job requires such skills to be learned and applied regularly. One thing leads to another, as the internet tends to, and you’re either reading random articles from various foreign presses…or viewing porn. I happen to be reading random articles at this moment…

One moment I’m reading about “The Question”, the classic DC comic hero…next, it’s on to apophenia. The definition: “the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data”

So my mind being politically motivated as it is, instantly had to draw a connection to modern politics. Specifically, conspiracy nuts. I have to visit Screw Loose Change.

The conspiracy crowd has been busy lately…as Pat from SLC comments:

Yes, yes, I know, they don’t have to propose a coherent theory; they are just asking questions…

Every now and then you come across a nutter when you’re out enjoying a fine Pilsner, and it just spoils it for you. I’m not going to get into the details of why they are wrong on the specifics of 9-11, and instead leave that to the professionals at Popular Mechanics, and the afore mentioned SLC, but I do want to touch on Apophenia a bit more.

Lets say hypothetically a new disaster occurs similar to 9-11. We’ll abstract it a bit for the sake of storytelling. I, as a spectator, watch a building get hit by a bus, which then explodes, and I turn to the person next to me and state, “That was weird that the bus blew up, there must have been explosives in it. I think everyone should get out of the neighboring buildings.”

Turns out there was explosives in the bus, and, the building in turn collapses, and through various seismic activities, the one next to it collapses too. That fact I was there was coincidental. The fact my friend was there was also coincidental. Now…a spectator sees this, and remembers me, and my comment. The cogs they start-a-turnin (whether it be pot, boredom, or both) and decides it was a little odd that I knew about the explosives, and especially odd that the tower came down; he looks me up. I used to work for the government. I’ve volunteered for political campaigns. I run a right wing blog. I have a family member that’s worked with buses (*I don’t, but for sake of the story*). I was raised Christian. I’m from Canada.

To a normal person, this is all just part of life. People say things. People do things. One doesn’t have anything to do with the other. But with Apophenia, one sees a right wing zealot who was brought in from another country who was trained by the government because he had the know how to attach a bomb to a bus. Is this valid? Of course not…but it must be because the official story is so ludicrous!

One of the psychological (yes I said it) short-comings with people who pose such elaborate theories, is that in practice, the theories themselves (in violation of Occam’s Razor) start as a questioning of one or two facts, but then have to account for everything that the questioning cannot account for.

SLC documents the new thinking in the conspiracy:

The hijackers existed and had plans to hijack the planes, but when they executed their assault on the cockpit, they were dumbfounded to discover that the jets would not react to their input. The planes were remotely controlled from somewhere (presumably WTC-7), at least in the case of the first two flights. Flight 93 was shot down. And Flight 77… what in the world are they going to do with Flight 77?

I recorded a special that the History Channel ran that’s pretty incredible that covers the whole history of 9-11 Conspiracies. Top Down analysis is an interesting way to look at an event. To reach a conclusion and then find the events that support it. Not really a scientific method, but a method…I suppose.

The official record hasn’t really changed. Loose Change has. Adjusting for things that have been disproved, filling in holes as the questions are posed, discarding what didn’t work, keeping what’s provocative. The burden of proof is not on Dylan Avery…which is a great position to be in…because then you don’t have to develop a cohesive sequence of events.

Dylan Avery might be retarded…or just suffering from Apophenia. The official account doesn’t seem to cover some of this problems. I mean, I don’t know for sure, I’m just asking.

There is currently a controversial debate concerning whether unusual experiences are symptoms of a mental disorder, if mental disorders are a consequence of such experiences, or if people with mental disorders are especially susceptible to or even looking for these experiences. -Dr. Martina Belz-Merk

Update: From the SLC comments.

There are no planes. There are planes, but they’re remote controlled from pods under their wings. Then they’re not remote controlled (although now you have the hangers-on in both camps), and they’re hijacked. There’s a possibility that space beams and lasers from underground bunkers were controlling them. There was a controlled demolition. It doesn’t matter that no explosives were seen, heard, found, or that they won’t ever be, but it LOOKED like a controlled demolition. But they weren’t hijacked by Islamists. OK- they were Islamists, but they were just the patsies. Well, maybe there were two planes who flew into WTC 1 and 2, but there was a Pentagon missile. We can prove that – ignore the hundreds of witnesses who saw a plane crash into the Pentagon, the giant whole and pieces of fuselage, and the families who heard their loved ones’ final terrified moments from the confines of phone calls – they’re just fakes. Well, maybe they’re real after hearing the NORAD tapes, but flight 93 wasn’t real. I haven’t seen the bodies, so they’re not real. Don’t listen to the coroner who examined the human remains – he’s a government worker. WTC7 was a controlled demolition – it just fell for no reason. OK – maybe fires were raging in it all day, and the debris from the Twin Towers falling on it weakened its unusual structure, but fire can’t melt steel. We know fire has never melted steel. OK – so nobody was actually claiming fire melted steel except for us, but it still isn’t possible that fire caused the for-some-reason-fireproofed steel to lose half of its strength…we have professors who disagree with the “government conspiracy” perpetrated on the sheeple, but we don’t actually agree or even know that the “official government story” is, but David Ray Griffin wrote a book that is as irrefutable as Newton’s law of gravity, etc. etc. etc.

It just goes on and on and on like that. The eternal game of Truther grabass. There is no end to it, because there is no end to the human imagination. No matter how many times they’re shown to be wrong and they realize it, no matter how many facts they’re shown and reluctantly (after fierce internal battles) realize that the facts trump their carefully constructed fantasies, no matter how many stupid theories they previously stood behind as it they were gospel, only to shift around later and pretend they never believed them, they will keep going.

They all agree on central, faith-based premises like “BOOSH is evil, the government lies, 9-11 was an inside job,” but they have no real coherent or consistent way to factually prove this (not to mention a limited and selective understanding of contemporary history). And when they have to incorporate things like (after years of denial) the hijackers were real and were Islamic terrorists, you can almost hear their hearts leap into their throats. – Good Lt

Conspiracy